The Flatland Chronicles

Blogcombing "Adventures of a Serious Writer"

PBS Mind, who has written some excellent things for our very own Buck Naked Politics, has a superb post at "The Adventures of a Serious Writer (It's All About the Craft)" in which she lists 14 editing tasks.  Writers as well as editors could benefit from reading this breakdown:  Editing is a Juggling Act

Random Link O' the Day. 50 Tools for Writers (*Not the Ones You're Used to Reading).

Here is a site which any person interested in improving his or her writing style will find useful.  The site lists links to suggestions for improving the clarity and flow of your prose, as well as the impact and originality of your story.

HAPPY EASTER! and Today's Random Link O' the Day: Check Out Dover Press's Subscription Page!

  Another free sample I received through my subscription to Dover Press... If yuo join, you'll get at least half a dozen free samples every week emailed to you.  Not only are there painted or colored in pictures like the one on the left (I added some texture because that's how I roll), but many, many color-yourself pieces of lavish clip-art. 

To see how to subscribe, jump back to the Flatland Almanack.

In addition to some fun, royalty-free clip-art, you can buy so many other wonderful gifts (for yourself or for someone else you know). I've written before (here and here) about the relaxing, joyful, and otherwise therapeutic effects that I experienced during a dark phase in my life from my Dover Press coloring books.  My favorite was the book of famous Japanese prints, but there were, and are, many many others. I notice that the newest release is a coloring book based on the paintings of Cezanne.  Imagine the pleasure to be had in coloring or painting those.

One of the best things about Dover Press art is that a lot of it IS art you can color for yourself.  I have some beautiful Celtic, Chinese, and Indian designs that were sent to me as part of my subscription. 

There's another piece of Dover Press Easter clip-art at The Flatland Chronicles.  (I wasn't going to waste those two free samples from their Holiday Book!)

Random Link of the Day for 3 April 2007. Lyrical Poems of E.E. Cummings.

The first E. E. Cummings or e e cummings poem I ever read was the one about the little lame balloon man whistling far and whee and I thought it was the stupidest thing I'd ever read, a child's poem, about children.  I guess I was 14 at the time; it was one of the poem included in our English textbook (which was all grammar, with literature at widely spaced intervals). 

It wasn't till I was in college and someone gave me a Cummings anthology that I came to appreciate the sheer artistry of the man, not to say the magical lyric quality of his poetry. I mentioned two of my favorites the other day when I wrote a list of my favorite love poetry in response to my Thursday meme....but here is an entire page of links to some of his beautiful and passionate and lyrical poetry. 

Random Link O' the Day for 2 April 2007. For Lovers of Dickens, an All-Purpose Website.

    If you love Dickens like I love Dickens, here is a comprehensive website.

I started reading Dickens seriously in my senior year of college.  I am not sure what started me, but I know I picked up my first copy at the bookshop at Wake Forest University.  Of course I'd read A Christmas Carol as a kid, and I'd read A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations in high school.   I liked them both, and Great Expectations was later to become one of my favorite Dickens novels, but you know how it is with books you're forced to read:  you don't connect in the same way as you do with something you read because you want to. 

The first book I read on my own was The Pickwick Papers.  I adored every single one of the Pickwick Club---I wanted Mr. Pickwick to be my grandfather---but I really fall in love with the comically terse (but very naughty) con man Alfred Jingle and then, inalterably, with the cockney manservant Samuel Weller.    Over the next few years, I read my way through his other works.   I've always had a tendency to fall in love with fictional gentlemen or "gentlemen" in Jingle's case, and quite a few of my fictional affaires were with characters from Dickens. 

The ones I really loved best were the ones I'd never heard much about:   Our Mutual Friend (because I developed a severe crush on the caddish Eugene Wrayburn and a slightly lesser one with his partner, Mortimer Lightwood) and Little Dorrit (sweet, gentlemanly Arthur Clennam, ditto, though I think I had even more of a girl-crush on tiny Amy Dorrit herself).  I am only slightly less fond of Bleak House.

I only recently read The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens' mysterious final novel.  I have been puzzling ever since over where he was going with it.  The frontispiece for the novel (which was prepared according to his instructions) infuriatingly hints at what might be going to happen, but of course it's hard to know for certain.  I can remember studying it at some length trying to work out what it meant.   Did John Jasper really kill Edwin?  While it seems the most obvious explanation, there are other possibilities that might explain his bizarre behavior. 

It's true that at the point the novel breaks off, he is beginning to take on the tiresome, moustache-twirling quality of Dickens most unsubtle villains and stalkers, but I was hoping for an unexpected twist:  it seemed unlikely that CD would tip his hand in that fashion since he was determined to write a true mystery (and perhaps piqued at the success of former friend/later rival Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone).  I was very much taken with the suave and enigmatic Datchery and longed to know who he was and what his interest was in Drood. 

I got a lot of my ideas from a wonderful Italian book  (by Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini) called The D Case, in which a number of fictional detectives meet to solve the case, but I've looked at many other sources since.  Alas, the book is more of a mystery than I think Dickens intended. 

Random Link O' the Day for 29 March 2007. A Compendium of British Slang. (Just the slang one needs to know.)

If you, like me, relish the delights on offer through BBC America, you may need a little assistance with your British slang.  The Brits are a very verbal people and very inventive when it comes to slang.

I have had the good fortune to be personally coached in British slang by my estuary expert, Mr. Rumcove.

Others are not so fortunate.  If  you loved  The Office (UK) , Life on Mars, Vincent, Ramsay in all his incarnations, and a whole host of other UK delights, but wished you could understand more than every third word, you need to check out this site. The Best of British---the American's Guide to Speaking British.

Generate Your Own Fairy Tale Using "the Proppian Fairytale Generator."

I really enjoy this site (brought to you by Brown University).  It explains itself thus:

[quote begins from "Digital Propp"]

"When Vladimir Propp created his theories of structural analysis in the 1930's it is unlikely that he foresaw the advent of the computing and information age, yet his concern with structure and the modularity of his construction of narrative anticipate that of computing models and languages today. Additionally, writing has increasingly become electronic writing, filtered and mediated through the interface of the computer. Thus with this in mind, it seemed only appropriate to choose the computer as the environment in which to explore both Proppian structural analysis and contemporary rewritings of tales.

"You have reached the Proppian Fairy Tale Generator, an experiment in electronic (re)writing and an exploration of the retranslation of modernist theory within the electronic environment."

In case that doesn't clear it up for you, you check the elements that you wish to incorporate in your fairytale and click "submit."  To understand the elements, click on the items in the list. 

For my first go, I chose "interdiction," "violation," "hero's reaction," "receipt of a magical element," and "unrecognized arrival."  Here's my fairytale.  It's a bit disjointed but rather poetic.

One last pear hung precariously from a tree growing on the other side of the fence.  It glowed like it was golden, and I could close my eyes and imagine the succulent juices falling down the back of my throat.  Pear juice.  An extravagance I could only dream about.  But the more I dreamt of this luxury the louder I heard my husband's voice cry out "No, No," and I would fall in the misery of my discontent.

I could not stay like I promised, so I took father's satchel hidden underneath his bed and followed the smell of him.  If I could not smell anger, I could at least smell my father, wandering the valley bloodthirsty and violent.  In the search for my father, I found someone else.  Another man, smelling for something angry, with only one eye and a tangling beard.  He was distinctly foreign.

I tore myself away from the life-threatening needles and pines. 

Then the bird came down beside me, and thanked me graciously for my good work.  In return, she left two feathers attached to my heels to replace the leather-bottomed shoes I lost.  "They will take you where you want to go, and you no longer will fear the people the live in the ground." 

Before I entered my home my brothers came out, and, thinking I was a peddler, asked how much the jade I carried was worth.

Random Link O' the Day. Blog Cliche Detector (Best. Cliche. Detector. Ever.)

The internet is a marvelous thing; among many other benefits, it provides us with limitless access to other people's ideas. 

But as Laurie Anderson tells us, "Language is a virus," and some of the witty phrases which have evolved and gone viral really need to be exterminated.  I honestly don't know how website moderators don't end up clawing out their own eyes and running amok after reading poster after poster after poster typing "You owe me a new keyboard,"  "meh,"  and.....well, I'll just link you to this list at Gawker, shall I?   And be sure to read the comments as well. 

So Gawker kindly published the Blog Cliche Detector: Bad Lingo: Blog Cliche Detector Is The New Proofreading Carefully!

And----because I never promised I'd stop at just one or even two-----check these out as well (also from Gawker).

• A Deeper Look at Bad Lingo:  When Did We Start Throwing Up in Our Mouths A Little, and Why?
• Bad Lingo Continues:  Throwing Up in Mouth Predates "Dodgeball," "Civilization.